Using a free e-mail service like MailChimp is standard operating procedure for many of the marketing professionals and clients that I work with. You can send up to 12,000 e-mails to 2,000 contacts, every month, for free. The interface is intuitive, and clean, for the amount of options that it has to offer. Notice I didn’t say it was “easy.”

Like any large software product, MailChimp does come with it’s challenges, one of them being the part where it’s “easily hooks up to your WordPress website.” Luckily, folks like Tracy Levesque produce awesome plugins like Easy Forms for MailChimp.

Episode 20: Easy Forms For MailChimp

• Get the plugin
• Get the addons

Listen to the audio

[powerpress]

Subscribe to the PluginTut channel!

Why use this plugin over another pop-up plugin?

The e-mail capture market is huge.

There’s some great services like OptinMonster, which create pop-ups with a degree of control that you’d expect from the likes of high-priced enterprise solutions. You can watch my tutorial videos by following this link.

That being said, OM is more of a jack-of-all-trades, versus a well-integrated solution strictly for MailChimp.

Easy Forms for MailChimp, on the other hand, really shines with the vast amount of MailChimp features, especially for those organizations that depend on using MC as a standalone customer database. Tracy’s team, which pulls from their experience as a services based business, have found themselves really capitalizing on this segment of the market.

Not everyone wants marketing automation and fancy pop-up animations.

Sometimes deep support for MC and managing subscribers outshines all the fancy conversion bells-and-whistles. Furthermore, Easy Forms is a WordPress-first plugin, and is more than just pop-up creator. In fact, the pop-up add-on comes at an additional cost, while giving you the ability to embed forms in pages, posts, and widgets with it’s free offering.

Is it right for you?

I think Tracy hits on all the right points during our PluggedIn Radio episode, so I invite you to spend the time to watch the show if you’re interested in seeing her demonstrate the software. If you need deep MailChimp integration, look no further than this plugin for your next project.

I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

The post Using Easy Forms for MailChimp with Tracy Levesque appeared first on PluginTut.

I had a few people asking questions after our AffiliateWP tutorial about creating affiliate programs, on how someone can manage the links that they are using in their content. Luckily PrettyLink Lite makes that super-easy.

Let’s take a look.

Using PrettyLink Lite

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PrettyLink Lite is pretty darned good, for a free plugin.

Having just updated to version 2.0 of the software, there are two major enhancements that really make it a pleasure to use. I’ve been using the plugin to manage my affiliate links ever since I started this website, and one of the pain points was getting the links into the content. It’s easy when you remember the product’s URL, but once you start linking to many different programs, you get a bit overloaded.

Previously, I would start to draft a blog post with my post editor loaded on one tab, and my PrettyLink Lite dashboard on the other. There are “quick copy” links near each link, so I would hope from one tab to the other, copying the links then applying them to my blog post.

Thankfully, I don’t have to do that anymore!

Version 2.0 has an easy to use modal pop-up in your post editor, which allows you to create new redirect URL’s or search for previously created redirect’s, right within your post editor. This is a huge boon for affiliate marketers, and a welcomed update to the plugin. It’s made my life so much easier in the short time I’ve been using it.

Overall, PrettyLink is much faster and snappier than before. Under the hood the code received a fresh coat of paint (really?), shaving off seconds of load time that I encountered in the old interface. Especially when it came to pulling up the link click stats, which could tax the load time.

Should you upgrade to the Pro version?

Get PrettyLink Pro

There are two strong reasons why I’m upgrading to Pretty Link Pro: Keyword replacements & affiliate disclosures.

The former being a huge time-saving opportunity when writing content, by turning pre-defined keywords into an affiliate link. Couple that with a handy new feature which automatically discloses links as affiliate links, and I’ve got a better overall experience for my readers.

If it were me, I’d start with using PrettyLink Lite, until you start gathering up a larger amount of affiliate links to manage. As you start to create more content, that auto-linking is going to be real handy.

What do you think? What are you using for your affiliate links?

The post How to re-direct & cloak affiliate links in WordPress appeared first on PluginTut.

If you’re new to researching affiliate programs, you might be overwhelmed by some of the complex (and scary!) affiliate platforms on the market. Luckily for us, there’s AffiliateWP from the makers of Easy Digital Downloads and Restrict Content Pro. If you’ve been following along with the recent posts here, you know I just launched a new e-book about starting a podcast, and AffiliateWP is the last piece of my digital platform puzzle.

Today, we’ll take a look at quickly setting up your new affiliate program on WordPress using AffiliateWP.

Getting started with AffiliateWP

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AffiliateWP Pricing

Let’s just get this out of the way right now, AffiliateWP isn’t free. That’s not a bad thing, but if you’re looking for free, you won’t find it here.

If you read my guide on selecting the best plugin, you’ll know that investing money in a solid plugin company is actually a good idea. Free shouldn’t make or break your decision, especially in the affiliate world, where the software is actually making you money in the long run.

Starting at $49, you can launch a fully-featured affiliate program for your products, on one website. That’s not a whole heck of a lot of money to — again — increase revenue for your product business.

At the time of this post, that $49 dollars is buying you 1-year of updates/support, along with the 15 official free add-ons to take AffiliateWP even further then it’s core offering.

The Best AffiliateWP add-ons

At the time of this post, there’s 27 add-ons for AffiliateWP.

The 15 free add-ons that come with the $49 & $99 price-points, and the 12 pro add-ons, which are included at $199 & $449, respectively. Side note: you’re getting unlimited domain usage when you bump up to the higher price-points, as well. 

I won’t cover all of the add-ons on this post, and if you watch the video above, you’ll see me demonstrate the setup of my favorite pro add-on, direct link tracking.

External Referral Links – Free add-on

Get the add-on.

If you’re setting up multiple domains for separate products, this is a killer add-on.

Are you using AffiliateWP but have another WordPress-based site you would like affiliates to promote? If so, then this free add-on is for you.

I have multiple products, and future products in the works, so having a system where I can refer traffic to the other sites + retain commission for my affiliate, is a great way to keep everyone happy.

Allow own referrals – Free add-on

Get the add-on.

This might not be for everyone, but depending on your product, you might want to give your affiliates a bit of an incentive to buy the product and earn their commission – as a way of discount. I haven’t tried this concept myself, but I’m thinking about giving it a whirl on the Podcast Starter Kit.

If you make a living off of affiliate sales, it could get quite pricey to purchase every product you write or review, and it also feels weird to ask people for free access to their products all the time, so this add-on seems like it’s the best of both worlds.

Direct Link Tracking – Pro add-on

Look, I’m new to the affiliate referral game. This site is my first attempt at “being an affiliate” and it’s not as glamorous as it seems. What really drives me off the deep end, however, is managing all the links.

Luckily there’s PrettyLink Pro, which saves my butt organizing all of my links, but if I want to do deep-linking — linking to an internal page of a product site — I have to create links every. single. time.

It’s maddening, but, Direct Link Tacking solves this! An entire domain can be whitelisted so that remembering unique affiliate ID’s or creating a custom link for interior pages doesn’t have to be a thing anymore. It’s great!

Wait, no add-ons for e-commerce support?

Nope.

AffiliateWP has support built right into it’s core, a nice touch for those of us drowning in plugin management.

Review the options page above, to see if your platform is supported. To enable support for e-commerce, membership, or the LMS loaded on your WordPress website, simply browse to Affiliates > Settings > Integrations.

From there you can check-off the integrations you want to activate, and AffiliateWP will appropriately track all conversions.

Installing AffiliateWP

Installing the plugin is a breeze, so I’ll outline some of the key areas you want to pay attention to when setting up your new AffiliateWP plugin program.

Your affiliate registration, dashboard, and terms pages

On install, AffiliateWP will take care of creating a page called, affiliate-area. On that page, it will place a shortcode [affiliate_area] to load the affiliate dashboard information, when logged in. If the user is browsing that page logged out, they will see a registration form & login box, instead.

You can designate additional pages by using a handful of other shortcodes provided to you like, [affiliate_login] & [affiliate_content].

Check your referral rates

Out of the box, the plugin will default to 20% of the sale. You can change this according what makes most sense for your business, but also to a flat fee, if you prefer. later on, if you want to give a particular affiliate more commission than another, you can browse to her user profile in the user table, and assign them a higher percentage.

E-mail templates

If you want to show your affiliates that you’re about the brand, you can fine-tune the e-mail branding & content that go out to your soon-to-be salespeople.

Great for passing on more content like training information, and support docs.

Creatives

We can’t always depend on our affiliates to come up with great creative. Why not help them out by creating your own? I created all of mine using a free photo editor at Canva.

Under the Creatives options page, you can upload images that represent your product, a sales offer, or any other attractive call to action design that an affiliate can embed with a simple copy/paste. Spend some time here being — creative.

Conclusion

AffiliateWP is the best affiliate program to integrate into your WordPress website, hands down.

It works with a wide range of e-commerce platforms, and more specifically, integrates well with the suite from Pippin’s plugins. If you’re still not sold on the idea of managing affiliates (a topic we didn’t cover here), take a look at the add-ons available to get an idea for what the plugin can do for your business.

Are you using AffiliateWP? Let me know in the comments.

The post How to setup AffiliateWP on your WordPress website appeared first on PluginTut.

Wether its a tiny little e-book, or a million dollar software company, EDD is a great platform to build your business on. I’ve covered plenty of reasons why you should invest in EDD for your business, and even broke down the costs of spinning up your first online store. I’ve even recommended a few plugins that will drive more engagement, and increase your annual revenues.

What I haven’t done yet is tinker with some of the settings that ship with a default EDD install. The following tutorial outlines a few of the switches I flip before launching, and a bonus strategy on increasing long-term engagement, with potential upsell opportunity.

Let’s do this!

The Journey

Just to give you some context with my EDD experience, I trust it to power my WordPress theme & plugin shops, which have combined revenues of well in the six-figure range. Which might sound like a lot, but if you know some of the big winners in the WordPress ecosystem, is just a drop in the bucket. The point isn’t the revenue numbers, but that I trust the platform, and the team even more, to be the heartbeat of my business.

Recently, I launched an e-book for podcasters, and I’ve kept careful track of the experience from start to finish. Finish? Who am I kidding? Optimizing your online store will forever be a work in progress!

Hopefully the following 5 tips will help you with your new store:

5 Things to do after install!

Watch the video to see this article in action, and don’t forget to subscribe.

Step 1: Enable user registration

In my WordPress theme & plugin business, the most common support question is: where is my download?

By default, EDD ships with user registration set to off, on the checkout page. For my business, having someone register means they will have an account page where they could download their purchase, and get support. If someone can’t find their original e-mail that the store sent them, or accidentally deleted it, that account page is the go-to place for their payment history.

Step 2: Enable credit card processing on site

Doing this is going to cost you a bit of money, as you’ll have to purchase the Stripe add-on (or another processor of your choice) to install into your site.

If you’re just launching and don’t have the funds to invest now, I would certainly make it the first add-on you buy. By default, EDD ships with PayPal standard support which gets you your money, but as you see in the video it’s not the best method to ensure your customers convert.

Step 3: Increase download link expiration

This is the second most popular request I used to get: my link expired! EDD ships with 24 hours set as the e-mail link expiration.

Picture this: someone buys your product at work on a Friday afternoon. It’s the last thing they checked off their busy to-do list, and then they left for the weekend. Sure, they got the e-mail, but by that time, they were already commuting home. Come Monday morning, that download link has expired, and your customer is frustrated.

I set mine to 72 hours, which is a fair amount of time, in my opinion.

Step 4: Create a login link

There are many ways to tackle this scenario, but I suggest the Login with Ajax plugin.

EDD ships with a shortcode that you can use, but that doesn’t help you with usting it in a widget or sidebar. Sure, you could get a “shortcode in a widget” plugin — meh.

Login with Ajax has a shortcode, a widget, login redirects, and a few options for look and feel. I especially like the pop-up modal link theme, very slick! The other pain point this plugin addresses is redirection. When a user logs in, you can tell WordPress to redirect them to a specific page. In this case, I’d link them to your purchase history page.

Watch the video to learn more.

Step 5: Take advantage of your account page!

EDD makes it easy to designate a page as your payment history page by using a simple shortcode. Since you’re doing this on a normal page, use this as an opportunity to provide additional content, support videos, and even an upsell to another product or service.

Any user that logs into your site is going to be more engaged than just browsing your website. You can really tailor the experience with this approach.

Conclusion

There’s plenty of additional options you might want to fine-tune, but these are my most immediate settings to adjust when I launch a new store. How about you, do you do anything special with your product store? What kind of product store do you have? Let me know in the comments below.

The post 5 Things to do after you install Easy Digital Downloads appeared first on PluginTut.

Having been in the online product space for about 8 years, and while you don’t read about any major “TechCrunch” wins in my career, I’ve sold well over a quarter-of-a-million dollars worth of digital products. When I launched The Podcast Starter Kit, I decided to keep a running journal of the experiences I went through. I wanted to uncover what a beginner might experience, setting up her first digital shop, eagerly looking to build an online empire.

It got me thinking, how much does an Easy Digitals Downloads store actually cost someone with a fresh new product, like mine?

Let’s dive in.

WordPress Hosting Costs

If you haven’t reviewed my 6 Tips Before Launching a Product, you should get it on your Pocket App. It’s a pre-launch checklist, that will put you in a better mindset for jumping into the digital product market space.

A sticking point within the post, I highlight the cost of WordPress web hosting & SSL certificates. These are requirements, not only for selling products with Easy Digital Downloads, but with any e-commerce platform.

You can start with an affordable plan from SiteGround, or level-up to a WP Engine managed account, or go big with a Pagely enterprise-grade offering — you make the choice depending on the size of your business. If you decide to go with your own home-grown hosting, or another vendor, you might have to purchase your own SSL certificate, if they don’t offer something like Let’s Encrypt. Check with them first.

You should also consider a backup plan (a literal backup plan for your data — not your business!) with the most affordable solution being a plugin like BackupBuddy, UpdraftPlus, or VaultPress from Jetpack. Some hosts, like SiteGround have basic backup included, so we’ll roll with that for now.

Easy Digital Downloads Cost

Zero! Zip! Zilch! Nada!

…in the beginning.

I also wrote a post about the 7 EDD Add-ons to Complete Your Online Platform, which are paid, not free. If you’re stomping your feet about why you have to pay for add-ons, please read How to Pick the Best WordPress Plugins, which will help you better understand where your money goes.

Let’s use my “7 Add-ons” article as an example, if you were to purchase all seven, you’re looking at a first-year cost of: $553 in add-ons. (Scroll to the bottom to learn how to save 30%)

Which doesn’t include the popular Stripe add-on at $89, bringing you to $642 in add-ons if you bought them all the day your doors opened.

Making business decisions

• Why do I need these add-ons?
• What about my other costs like lead capture, automation, design and CRM/Helpdesk?
• Why aren’t these features included?

Let’s start with that last question: why aren’t these features included? I’ll sum it up short & sweet, maintaining add-ons is a lot of work, and the EDD team is already providing you with a platform to feature, sell, and deliver products for free — this stuff is icing on the cake.

Even more so, some of the add-ons, like recurring payments, can greatly increase your revenue year-over-year, even. So the investment, while it might seem heavy in the beginning, is offset by adding time-saving features, or revenue generating channels.

Is there an alternative?

Maybe you can find a hosted SaaS solution that has some of these EDD features, at a small monthly fee, versus the upfront add-on cost?

Sure, Shopify does (some) this. The first issue is, you don’t control all of the aspects of your website, which is crucial to success as you grow.

Second, it’s not modular. You get whatever Shopify has to offer, at the monthly fee they are charging you. When Joe and I launched The Podcast Starter Kit, we opted not to purchase any add-ons at launch. We kept our startup cost to a minimum, as we were already in the red, getting the book published.

Third, moving to a hosted solution comes with additional costs, like payment processing, to name only one. Here’s what the pricing looks like for a basic plan:

• $29 monthly fee
• 2.9% + 30¢ transaction fee
• Additional 2% fee if you don’t use their payment processor

There is no monthly fee for EDD, you’re just paying for your hosting plan, and losing the percentage depending on the payment gateway you choose.

Other Costs

Web hosting + EDD isn’t the cost in your new endeavor. I started to hint at other areas you might need to spend on above, than just your store add-ons:

• Get a good theme
• Get a page builder
• Get some lead capture

All three are paid, but have alternate free solutions. If you want to see how I built my first e-book store, with paid & free services, watch this video:

Pay nothing now; Invest later

This is an investment.

Purchasing add-ons shouldn’t frighten you, but at the same time, don’t be foolish with your money. This is business after all.

While my friends at EDD would love that I told you to go buy all of their add-ons on day one, I think the scrappy product launcher needs to know when she’s ready to make the leap.

It’s a balancing act. Understand that you might be losing out on sales with no on-site credit card payments now, but plan to invest profits from future sales, into the Stripe add-on. A small example that you can apply to many of the add-ons you think will help your new digital product store.

Oh, if you must have all your add-ons on launch day, they offer 30% off your customizable add-on startup bundle.

The post How much does an Easy Digital Downloads store cost? appeared first on PluginTut.

For those that feel like removing the credit of our beloved content management system is a bad thing, there is a small security argument to be had, and that’s, obscurity.

Tricking malicious bots that crawl websites for the word “WordPress” in the footer, gives you a small leg up on hackers by removing the branding. Let’s dive in!

Install Advanced Twenty Seventeen Plugin

In this video, I show you how to customize Twenty Seventeen theme well-beyond it’s out-of-the-box options.

First, install the Advanced Twenty Seventeen plugin. This plugin will add a slew of new customization options to the theme’s customizer, which you can access at Appearances > Customize.

From background colors, to fonts, to content layout — Advanced Twenty Seventeen plugin is pretty darned powerful. That said, we’re only interested in modifying the footer credits today. Browse to Appearances > Customize > Advanced: Footer > Custom Copyright. 

At this customizer panel, you can overwrite the default slogan with your own credits phrase. Pretty simple, eh?

If you’re only looking for a plugin to modify credits, this plugin might be overkill, but there is a bonus. You can customize the font and overall layout look & feel in this customizer panel. The plugin is all about making your own theme edits, and it’s a breeze when you’re in the customizer.

While this plugin is great for changing that footer text, you might find yourself enjoying this plugin for customizing other areas of the Twenty Seventeen theme. I plan on doing more tutorials on WordPress’ new default theme in future videos and posts. If you have one that you would like me to cover, drop it in the comments below.

The post Remove “Proudly Powered By WordPress” in Twenty Seventeen theme appeared first on PluginTut.

I’ve come across a lot of WordPress projects where the theme looks great, but the page titles make the rest of the site look too “blog-y.” If you use a page builder like Beaver Builder, you might use it to create a sales landing page, and the page title just gets in the way of your layout.

In today’s (quick) tutorial, I’ll show you how to hide the page title with the Toggle The Title plugin.

Hiding WordPress page titles

Download Toggle the Title plugin

I don’t normally recommend plugins that haven’t been updated in over 2 years, so proceed with caution (read: FUSE). It is, however, the most lightweight plugin I’ve found to accomplish this without much fuss. Once you install & activate the plugin, an option box will appear on your page editor:

Simply uncheck that option and the page title will be removed from display on the front-end. It’s important to note that this plugin actually removes the output of the title, and doesn’t just hide it with CSS.

Using a plugin like this opens up a few opportunities:

• Name your pages something more user friendly, which isn’t displayed on the website. pro tip: don’t forget to change the “slug” of your page link to something more SEO friendly. 
• If you create sales landing pages or product pages, having the page title display can feel out of the place. This is a great way to solve that.

If you don’t want to use a plugin, the only other method is to code a new template file or override page titles through hooks that your theme supports. For this post, we’re just covering a plugin based approach.

Hope this helps, please feel free to leave any questions in the comments.

The post How to hide the title on WordPress pages appeared first on PluginTut.

As we progress our trend of e-commerce tutorials, specifically Easy Digital Downloads, we’ll uncover why EDD should be at the heart of your own platform. Wether you’re selling one-time purchase e-books, or recurring payment to software products, choosing EDD positions you for long-term success. Couple that with the flexibility of WordPress, and you’ve got the horsepower to compete with the big boys.

Let’s dive in.

What is a platform?

Facebook, Medium, and Google — to an extent.

These are all platforms that want you to exist within their walls, contributing in-app time and content, only to see their own stock values increase. Without going crazy, the bottom line is, you don’t own the full customer experience. If you want to sell your product on Facebook, which arguably has the most eyeballs right now, you have to pay to play. Sure they have handy pixel advertising features you can harness, but ultimately, you’re in their sandbox. If you want to reach all of your hard-earned followers, ante up.

Every product company should be thinking about building their own platform to own the end-to-end customer experience. At the very least, save you from having to spend loads of money on pay-per-click advertising.

Easy Digital Downloads is the master cog in your e-commerce wheel

By now, we all know that EDD is a great plugin for selling digital products. (Make sure to read the 6 Things to do before launching a digital product.) While the plugin provides you the ability to list & sell products, provides decent reporting, and has a team to support you, there are many add-ons for EDD that help round out your platform strategy.

Powerful add-ons that help grow your digital product shop

The following list of EDD add-ons can help you form a powerful e-commerce platform on your WordPress website.

Free downloads

Honestly, I’m surprised it took this long for EDD to come up with this add-on, as I’m sure they’ve been getting requests for quite some time. Either way, everyone loves free, and free is increasingly the most popular way to get people into your platform.

The Free downloads add-on will scoop up that valuable e-mail, in exchange for a product of your choosing. In the past, if you wanted to offer free, you set the price to $0, but the customer sill had to go through an entire checkout process.

ConvertKit

So, what do you do with that free e-mail when you get it? Drop it into an automated e-mail marketing system. EDD has this wonderful ConvertKit add-on, which is a paid e-mail marketing platform, that’s easy to use and made for more common folk.

I’m a fan of the Drip marketing platform, and there’s a free add-on available on here. Either way, the idea is, you now own the customer experience, and you’re fee to connect with them as you choose. No Facebook algorithm or paid acquisition.

Reviews

A no brainer, right?

Reviews will keep the customers engaged, even helping you close new sales. Someone really likes your product, they leave a great review, new customer reads it — boom, a sale.

How do you get them to leave a review? Look at the previous add-on I recommend, e-mail them a few days after their purchase — you can thank me later.

Acquisition survey

Feedback is important.

Knowing how people use your product, what they like/dislike, and where they found you helps you shape so many aspects of your business. Not only does it impact product development, but it also tells you where to spend your money in marketing, to acquire new business.

This add-on adds a survey at checkout, so you can capture that info when the time is right.

EDD User History

Congratulations, you made a sale! How can we turn this on autopilot? Data! Combine your survey data from the above add-on recommendation, with a look at the path your customer took on your website to finalize the purchase. Let me give you an example:

Let’s say someone buys your e-book, but they didn’t fill out the survey at checkout. How will know what enticed them to buy? The EDD User History stores the pages they read along the path to the completed purchase.

If someone came in on your hot new blog post, now you’ll know that your content marketing efforts are paying off.

EDD Product Updates

Let’s say you don’t want to use your ConvertKit or MailChimp account credits to send an e-mail blast to your customers announcing a new update. Or perhaps you’re end of lifing a product, and you need to make sure people read the message.

EDD Product updates will do that, and give you a “read receipt” in your customer’s dashboard inside WordPress. Just another way for you to circumvent the walled-in platforms.

Recurring Payments

Last but not least, the Recurring Payments add-on.

You might think this is a stretch, but let me explain: when your complete platform strategy is firing on all cylinders, traffic is coming in, customers are converting, you’re staying in touch with your customers, getting feedback, and providing a great experience — they don’t mind paying you.

That’s when Recurring Payments puts your revenue on “passive income” mode. You don’t have to worry if your customer is going to renew their plan, and there’s no reminder e-mails to send out, payments happen automagically. It’s great!

Bonus round: Memberships & Affiliate programs

I’ve only scratched the surface on building the ultimate platform for your business, luckily, there’s a lot more to cover.

A huge benefit for choosing EDD, it’s compatibility with sister products, Restrict Content Pro & AffiliateWP.

In the e-book example, not only can you sell that digital product, but you can offer a membership of premium content to go along with it. Want to grow your business even further, attach an affiliate program to it, so others can sell your product for you.

Endless opportunities here, and you own the entire platform.

The post 7 Easy Digital Download add-ons that complete your e-commerce platform appeared first on PluginTut.

Selling digital products is a great way to open up new streams of revenue for your business. Years ago, when someone jumped into selling info (digital) products, it was spurred on by the dirty little phrase: passive income.

Well, that game is a lot harder now. Some of the lessons I share with you today, will help you position your offering a little better than your competition.

Let’s dive in!

This WordPress tutorial is all about designing & developing a WordPress website to sell your e-book. The same routines I outline here could also be used for any other digital product or marketing website.

E-book website crash course

Back in the day, building products and putting the technology together to handle the transaction, wasn’t exactly beginner friendly. Early adopters who invested in this market were seemingly crushing it, while appearing on every popular podcast to give us their tips for success — and revenue reports.

Now it’s your turn! WordPress has become more powerful, tools have gotten easier, and payment gateways are — well, they’re still payment gateways!

But you still have to have a great product, and you have to be great at marketing too. I’d even go as far as advising would-be digital product owners to think like their favorite celebrity. I know what that sounds like, hear me out.

What I mean by that is, you have to be everywhere on social, consistently showing up and putting yourself out there. You have to grow an audience before you can start selling to them. Even that doesn’t guarantee you’ll be able to convert, you’re still going to have to work at it.

Start with the homepage of your website

How I built it:

• Baton Pro
• Note Plugin
• Drip marketing automation

WordPress is a great platform for selling digital products.

It’s great, not only because of the e-commerce plugins you can access, but designing a website on WordPress is getting easier (read: I said easier compared to the past, not easy for everyone.) In the tutorial video, I demonstrate the site build using my Baton Pro theme, if you don’t feel like parting with your hard earned money, there’s also Baton Free. I’ll go through this post in the same I order I take in the video, let’s begin!

A big juicy hero call-to-action

At the top of the site, I like to use a big juicy hero area that clearly defines the product and the offering. This is your moment to capture the visitor, giving yourself the opportunity to set you apart from the rest of your competition. I like to answer a few questions when I think of the headlines for the main hero:

• Why are they here?
• What are they going to get out of this?

Your copy will also set the tone for what type of customer you’re best fit to serve. For example, my main hero reads “The book that catapults you into podcasting like a pro.”

Here’s how I interpret that:

• It’s a book (an e-book in this case).
• It catapults me, as to say, it’s not this easy-going long drawn out thing.
• The result is podcasting like a pro. Again, not podcasting for fun or for doctors, but for pros.
• The tone is almost “bootcamp” or coach-like, which should reinforce there’s some effort on the readers part.

Headlines and call-to-actions can (and should) always be adjusted as you hone in on your perfect audience. While this statement might work for me right now, I can certainly see myself adjusting along the way.

The first action is the buy button

There’s not much rocket science behind this decision, other than making sure my visitor can easily find where to buy this book. Depending on what you’re selling, you might direct them to both a buy page AND a learn more page.

The supporting hero role

As we make our way beyond the first hero, we meet our second hero. Albeit smaller and not as commanding, my point here is to show off the book cover and provide some reasoning and supportive copy to entice the user to buy. You guessed it, the action button remains the buy button.

Are they the right fit?

Continuing on, we get to the section where I define the three best customer avatars for this book:

• Freelances
• Business owners
• Creators

Each have their own unique desires for publishing a podcast, along with very different (or not) goals. What I’m trying to do is qualify who will be best served with our product.

The lead magnet

How I built it:

• Note plugin
• Drip marketing automation

The more advanced looking hero area, with the nice microphone graphic, is all about lead magnet/capture. Here I’m offering up two free videos, sent via e-mail, of Joe and I walking you through our physical podcast setups. The intent here is to capture folks into a list, and eventually warm them up to buying, or at least recommending us to someone they know.

Once they sign up, they are connected to my Drip marketing automation account, and the two free videos are e-mailed to them automatically.

Supporting content

The last area on the homepage is a supporting graphic that shows an example of the book and outlines some book statistics like page count, chapters, and more. This would be a great place to list out all of the features of your product, after you’ve discussed the benefits.

The quotes page (shareable content)

How I built it:

• Canva.com
• Unsplash.com
• Social Warfare plugin
• Jetpack carousel
• WordPress galleries

On the Quotes page, I created a bunch of marketing tiles that have fun quotes from the book. These tiles can be shared on all of the social media channels to help drive traffic and interest back to the site. I used free stock photography from Unsplash.com and used pre-made templates from Canva.com to make the graphics.

The gallery itself is powered by default WordPress galleries, and the carousel feature of the Jetpack plugin.

This particular page also has the share buttons and click-to-tweet quotes from early-access readers that reviewed the book. This section is powered by the Social Warfare plugin, and was fairly easy to setup.

Think about adding a “fun” shareable content page to your product website.

Buy it page

How I built it:

• Beaver Builder Pro
• Easy Digital Downloads

By default, Easy Digital Downloads product pages are just plain WordPress pages.

Sure you can add some content in there and move things around to make them look like “better” designed pages, but why not use a plugin that helps you create custom layouts? That’s where Beaver Builder fits in, and it allowed me to create a more engaging buy page for my e-book.

I added an additional column within the page to put in multiple buy buttons and re-inforced the quotes that I had from the Quotes page. Since we offer a money-back guarantee, I included a nice little graphic to build trust with my buyer. Sprinkle in some additional content and some images, and you’re off to the conversion races!

The checkout page

How I built it:

• Baton Pro
• Easy Digital Downloads

Included in the Baton Pro theme is a landing page template. This template strips out the header and footer of the website, and serves up just the content area. That means I can ensure that when the visitor is at the stage of purchase, there’s nothing else to distract them on the screen. EDD uses a shortcode to place the checkout display on any page, so setting this up was a breeze.

Wrapping up

I hope you enjoyed this crash course on designing & building a WordPress website for selling an e-book. I moved fast so I could hit on all of the major milestones and reasoning, but to also serve as an example that you can launch a minimal viable product site, fairly quickly.

If you have questions, please leave them in the comments below!

The post How to design a WordPress website to sell an e-book appeared first on PluginTut.

That’s powered by a Facebook remarketing pixel, and in today’s tutorial, I’m going to show you how to add that Facebook tracker to your WordPress website. It’s a fairly easy process, and can become quite powerful to help sell your product — maybe. Before we dive into learning the ins-and-outs of configuring this within your WordPress website, let’s talk about remarketing from a high-level.

Why Facebook remarketing?

Now more than ever, getting people to visit your website feels like a monumental task. Gone are the days of “build it and they will come”, or increase your traffic by sprinkling in a few keywords into your title tag. Content marketing is at the top of everyone’s game plan, and creating great content is key for that plan to become successful.

Imagine a situation where you’re using your blog as the cornerstone to driving organic traffic to the site. You spend hours creating content, planning out a content roadmap, and shaping that storyline around why people should trust & buy from you. There’s a hope that once you press publish, share on social channels, that the reader will be so moved by your words (or audio, or video) that they buy from you. Sadly, that’s not the case.

How do we get our customers to keep us top of mind?

First things first, be consistent. If you want to hit 1,000 subscribers on YouTube, keep the videos coming, same with blogging. Second, pay for that traffic to come back to you, in this case — remarketing. Think of remarketing as the best bang-for-your-buck in a paid acquisition strategy. I don’t want to dive deep into Pay-Per-Click, it’s certainly an art form to make it really work, and I’m no expert.

How remarketing works, for dummies

1. Someone visits your website
2. Facebook adds a pixel (or cookie) to the visitor’s Facebook account
3. Facebook provides that audience data to you
4. You  can then advertise to everyone in that segment

So instead of a spray and pray mentality of PPC, you can now capture warmer (albeit, smaller) traffic of visitors that have already consumed your content, to serve up ads to. To reiterate the advantages:

1. It’s going to be more affordable traffic for you to purchase versus cold traffic.
2. The viewer of the ad is already familiar with your product
3. You can be more targetted

I’m sure there’s a lot more to discuss here, but let’s dive into getting this working on your WordPress website!

Installing a Facebook pixel to your WordPress website

In the video above, I show you how to use Pixel Cat, a new plugin for adding a Facebook pixel to your site without coding. I enjoyed using it, because of it’s simplicity, literally taking me about 15 seconds once I had it installed.

As you can see, it doesn’t get any more straightforward than that. Paste in your pixel (watch the video, I show you where to get it) and hit save. If you want to block out other user roles, you can add them in the Exclude Users section. It’s really that easy.

If you want to test that the Facebook pixel is actually being loaded, you can install the Facebook Pixel Helper Chrome add-on. A handy tool during your development process, or even to see what sites are pixel’ing you along the way.

Download Pixel Cat.

Have any questions or comments, leave them below!

The post How to add a Facebook remarketing pixel to WordPress appeared first on PluginTut.